Critical Essay by Barbara Wall

In the following excerpt, Wall discusses Grahame as a children's author and The Wind in the Willows as a children's book.

The contribution of Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) to the evolution of a modern voice in the narration of fiction for children is not easy to assess, in spite of the fact that The Wind in the Willows (1908) is generally regarded as one of the two most celebrated English children's classics, the other being Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Lois R. Kuznets selected only Grahame, Dodgson and Macdonald for her examples of children's classics in ‘Tolkien and the Rhetoric of Childhood’; The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature speaks of The Wind in the...